The Slate, Should We Start With A Clean One?

Anyway, down to business. The Pantech Slate was one of four new messaging phones released by AT&T unto the public last holiday season. Among these were the Quickfire, (AT&T) The Matrix, (Pantech) The Slate, (Pantech) and the Propel (Samsung). I have had the pleasure of testing out three of these four, and I must say, the Slate is my favorite.

It simply has alot going for it:

1. Beautiful, Huge Display. 2.2 inches of pure Glory. I have never been so impressed with a cell phone's screen, and I have had quite a few. It's big, bright, colorful, and just all around AHmazing.

2. Nice, Spaceous keyboad. It's full QWERTY (obviously, for texting purposes), and there is tons of room. The buttons have a nice raised feel to them, and it is so easy to text quickly on this phone. Not to mention the Space Bar is huge, which also helps.

3. Good Reception. I have yet to find a place in my daily life that I haven't had at least one bar. (Which is enough to send a text, which incidentally this phone was made for) The average is three to four bars.

4. Decent Camera for a phone. The biggest resolution is 1280x960, and it's 1.3 megapixels, so the pics come out pretty nice. Of course you can also choose lower resolution settings if you want to.

5. Loud Speaker. Both for playing ringtones, and for speakerphone.

Cons:

1. Not enough memory for ringtone collectors, such as I. It has around 20 megabytes built in (The average ringtone taking up about 200 kb) which if thats how much memory you actually got to use, then there would be no problem. But the fact is, alot of that is taken up by Games (included that you CAN'T delete), Your pictures, and the system stuff that just takes up space. Which leads me to this;

2. No MicroSD slot. Wtf? On a phone nowadays, especially one considered decently high end, I can't even begin to comprehend why they didn't include a MicroSD slot. Especially with the memory already lacking as it is.

3. Slow Bluetooth. And I've bluetoothed with alot of phones. I wouldn't say it takes forever, but it does take its fair time. Picture an old woman driving down the road. There you go.

4. No 3G Support. Again I ask, why? This is a nice phone, and if they fixed these few small things, it would be even more amazing. But, alas, as stated, there isn't 3G support. Looks like you're stuck with EDGE.

Now, if you can get past these few small things, it is a VERY nice phone, and one I would recommend. I'll be using it everyday until I upgrade next year to whatever iPhone is out then, and I'll give it props. It's nice. If you're looking for a good phone, that won't break the bank, and you don't mind the lack of an SD slot, and the EDGE network, then look no further, you've found it.